Microsoft Says No New Xbox 360s In 2009

OrochimaruVoldemort writes "Microsoft has said to Engadget that they do not plan on making new consoles available in 2009. This comes from the same company that said it wasn't producing a Blu-ray drive for that Xbox, so it is pure speculation. Expect to see a new console within that year. Engadget also hints: 'Microsoft representative let us know today that "While we don't normally comment on rumors like this, we can tell you that we have no plans to release a new console in 2009."' The rest of us will wait and see. For now, focus on what is available."

Make way for the console that will kill PC gaming!

I just wanted to get this out of the way now before rumors start flying.

Re:Make way for the console that will kill PC gami

See, the sad thing is PC gaming isn't King, even if its better. Consoles make 2-3x as much as PC gaming does at least. There's no contest anymore. The King was crowed long ago.

3: Subscription-based games = profit!

I hate to say this, but MMO games and the continuing subscription model limited only by server and bandwidth costs make PCs king of the profit field.

I hate to say it because I think all of the MMO games currently available are roughly comparable to being consumed by and subsequently shit out of a bear.

Eventually some visionary developer is going to get it right, though... and they're going to end up richer than God.

Re:Make way for the console that will kill PC gami

Consoles, in aggregate, generate more game software sales revenue from traditional brick and mortar retail outlets than the PC. Its a bit more difficult to sort out the hardware side. NVIDIA posted a record quarter for its first quarter this year (at $1.15 billion) but that's from a variety of sources and only one of the big two name sin gaming. There is no good way to filter out PC gaming hardware vs non-gaming hardware outside of video cards so we won't try and split up the more than $100 billion a year PC system sales to compare it to the $8 billion or so in console hardware sales.

Sticking with software for a moment; if you compare US PC retail software sales vs US console software sales the PC came in third behind the PS2 and XBOX 360 last year with $900 million from brick and mortar stores (ignoring that NPD collects data from only 60-80% of the market and extrapolates the remainder). If you add back in subscription sales [next-gen.biz] the PC was actually the top (non-portable) platform last year with over $2 billion in software and subscription sales. And if you accept recent evidence that digital sales have reached parity/exceeded brick and mortar sales then the PC is in the neighborhood of $3 billion in software derived revenue per year, or in the same ballpark as the top three console platforms combined.

Of course, all of that is a lot of silly wang measuring using NPD numbers. Which really amounts to comparing one wildly inaccurate (or at the very least, incomplete) set of numbers to another. The frustrating thing is that while NPD uses a lot of hand waving when describing their data collection methods and releases very selective sub-sets of data to the public (remember, their business model revolves around selling the detailed stuff); our illustrious media accepts these numbers as immutable, indisputable, fact. They then turn around and ignore that the $18.5 billion figure includes hardware, software, and accessories sales for nine platforms (PS2, XBOX, XBOX 360, PS3, DS, Game Boy Advanced, and PSP) plus partial software sales from a tenth (the PC) and proclaim that video games outsell theatrical movies tickets by almost two to one. The general public in turn parrots this line ('cause the news is always right) and console fans trumpet the 17 to 1 ratio vs retail PC software sales as proof that the PC industry is essentially dead.

Re:Make way for the console that will kill PC gami

Erm...the missing platforms from the list of nine would be the Wii and the GameCube.

Re:What PC can't play a video game?

So if a game engine can scale down to the Wii, why can't it scale down to low-end PCs?

It most certainly can. I've heard so many people say things like "Oh, the xxx engine can't do this or that fast, etc..." More often than not, it's the content, not the engine, that kills performance. At my last company, our in-house engine (which was then making Xbox, PS2, and GameCube titles) was ported to the PSP. It did a fine job, too. That same engine is being used now for all current-gen platforms (360, PS3), and they're still making PSP games with it. There's a limit though - it wouldn't be efficient to scale it down to the Nintendo DS - they have an engine for that which is optimized specifically for low-memory platforms.

It's not always an issue of just the engine, though. There are lots of issues with scaling a game. If you have an extremely CPU-intensive AI system that runs fine on the Xbox or PS3's multiple cores, how do you affect this without substantially impacting gameplay? If all your art is shader-based, and relying on shaders that simply don't exist on the Wii, then what? There's not always a practical way to scale down the number of bones a character has - that's another scaling problem for you.

At some point, it becomes easier to simply rework the game for the lower-end platform than to port the game. Likewise, the gap between the highest end PC and lowest end of the current market seems to be substantially larger than it used to be.

The game my company is currently developing requires hardware with shader 2.0 support at a minimum. All of our assets are being developed with this hardware in mind. Should we create two sets of assets, one for shader 2.0 hardware and one using simple blended textures? Lighting, another shader-dependent beast, would end up looking completely different for the two systems. While this is possible, you end up making significant compromises in the look of the game.

It's all great to say "scale it down to low-end PCs", but we're making version two of a successful online PC game. Our players will be expecting a game that looks and plays significantly better than the first version. So while we're not going to require ridiculous specs, we still have to compete with the screenshots and videos of other PC games. There's a pretty significant difference between a Tetris game and what we're producing.

Of course they don't have plans.

If they said they did it would hurt sales of the current revision. Now if Nintendo or Sony were going to release a Wii2 or PS4 in the next year you'd have the standard MS vaporware announcement while they scramble to actually put a product together.

Re:

With as well as the Wii is selling right now I don't think Nintendo would want to announce a Wii2 for a while.

Re:Of course they don't have plans.

Yes, what they will do is wait for the market to become saturated with Wiis. Then they will start selling different colors. Colors will correspond to different bundled games. After a while, they'll release a Wii.1 version with expanded internal Solid State memory, possibly more RAM (to enable larger texture files), and the elimination of the Gamecube slots to make it slimmer. It's possible you'll be able to purchase a USB accessory to connect Gamecube devices to.

Re:

I'm with you on the colors and the expanded internal storage memory, but Nintendo has never modified their hardware while keeping the same system/name.

The only thing that was extremely close in terms of hardware (old system + new features) was the Gameboy

No new *kinds* of 360s in 2009

I read the title to mean that MS would stop making 360s.

What the article said is that there isn't going to be a slim version of the 360 or a 360 with a Blu-Ray drive.

Quite a big difference, I think.

Re:

It's almost as though Microsoft is actively trying to fail.

Re:No new *kinds* of 360s in 2009

How so? They've already got at least 3 versions of the console. How is it that further confusing the market is their only possible means of success?

This may shock you, but the most popular and financially successful non-portable console of this generation has a grand total of *one* version.

Re:No new *kinds* of 360s in 2009

File this one under "Ways in which pedantry and literalism have damaged your brain".

Re:

Do you really believe he has a file with a name like that?

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware Still Isn't Profitable

Are you trying to make it sound like MS hemoraging money is a bad thing?

If they keep trying to break in to the Japanese dominated console market and keep failing, losing tons of money, all I can say is "Good for them".

Re:Xbox 360 Hardware Still Isn't Profitable

Are you retarded? Why would they dump the 'difficult and risky to chip' xbox360 market for the 'I can pirate games with 30 seconds on a search engine' vista market?

If they abandon the console market, it will be because they're leaving the games industry all together.

Re:No new *kinds* of 360s in 2009

We're not being pedantic, thats a straight forward interpretation of what is written.

Yes, that's a straightforward interpretation. Another straightforward interpretation is that there'd be no new types of 360s (360s could possibly refer to either individual machines, or classes of machines, much like "I didn't see any new birds" could refer to individuals, or species). And since a sentence having multiple straight forward interpretations is completely bog-standard in English -- it can take a great deal of effort to write in such a way that there isn't multiple possible meanings -- most people are very used to holding these multiple definitions in their head, and selecting the most likely one based on context and experience. Or all of them, which is how puns work.

So of the two meanings, which is more likely? MS isn't going to manufacture any xbox hardware of any kind in 2009? Or they are not going to release a new design for their hardware in 2009?

Maybe pedantry isn't the right word. What is the right word for assuming there to be only one possible correct interpretation of a sentence?

Though to be fair, adding the word "types" or "kinds" would have certainly made the meaning more clear. I'm all for that.

Re:No new *kinds* of 360s in 2009

Yes, that's a straightforward interpretation. Actually, sorry, I'll take back what I said, saying that there will be no new 360s in 2009 isnt really an interpretation at all, it's just what's written.

Realising that its referring to types or models is an interpretation, extrapolating meaning from missing words and from the text of the summary.

Obviously it didnt take me very long to realise my mistake, but the fact is I saw the headline, and was momentarily taken aback by the decision not to produce any new 360s at all next year.

The plural also didnt help. If the headline read "No New Xbox 360 In 2009" it would be much more obvious, but having it as a plural further confuses.

Seriously?

Microsoft not having any plans on May 14th 2008 to release a new X360 model before December 31, 2009 is front page news worthy?

well duh

They are too busy fixing the ones they already built.......

I'll believe it when i see it....oh wait..i mean don't see it

Translation...

'We don't want to say, "We're releasing a better version next year." and then have people refuse to buy the old units like they did with the HDMI thing. Especially as it would be for a full twelve months this time. That would really kill our lead against the other consoles in North America. So, uh, "We've got no plans!"'

It's almost certainly a lie. But they would be crazy to tell the truth and destroy their market until the new models did finally ship.

It's pretty much guaranteed Sony will ship new models too. Bigger hard drives, cooler processors, smaller cases, new skus with games bundled. There are always new stimuli to keep the market active. But no one in their right mind acknowledges their roadmap for the next 20 months (to the end of '09), screwing their current market with all the people who figure they'll just wait.

It's not just consoles. Canon releases a new xxxD camera every year or so, a new xxD camera every 18 months, pretty much like clockwork. And yet they refuse to announce the new model until the last possible moment, denying everything they can, so as not to trash the current prices. Look at what happened to the $3,000 Canon 5D that everyone assumed would have got a new revision in February. Even without a new rev turning up, discounting got so competetive on the assumption the old model was about to become obsolete that it now goes for a hair over $2,000. Even then, people like myself who'd still get a lot from the 5D are putting off their purchase, waiting for whatever its successor turns out to be or much lower 5D prices, rather than letting Canon shift stock now.

Re:Recent games are putting pressure on them...

I think you guessed poorly. As someone in retail electronics, the vast majority of people have no idea what resolution means. Couple that with the higher and higher demands on performance PC hardware, and its an expensive proposition. Joe Majority is not going back to PC gaming, ever. And the majority is all that really matters here.

Re:Recent games are putting pressure on them...

I think you've got this entirely backwards. It's PC gaming that's in trouble, not the consoles. Average people have little to no interest in constantly upgrading their PCs just so the newest game will run, worrying about driver problems, patches, the current rash of DRM on PC games, etc. With an Xbox360 or PS3, they just come home with the game, put the disc in, and it starts. They didn't even have to look on the back of the box before they bought it to see if they needed to spend $200 on a new video card first. The reason it takes games like Assassin's Creed so long to come out for PC is because the PC version is almost an afterthought now, it's hardly even considered a major platform. Grand Theft Auto IV is probably the "biggest" game of the year, and last I saw it didn't even have a PC version planned. If you're a PC-exclusive gamer now, you're going to get left behind on a lot of the big games, and I only see this trend continuing in the future.

Re:Or maybe the XBox 4D?

They:
1. Release XBox360 slim (or with blu-ray...) then
2. Release XBox 4 and 'legitimately' call it '4'

The whole 360 thing was to have a number starting with 3 to compete with Sony.